It’s been almost 4 years since Patrice O’Neal’s death in 2011.
I met him twice at the Punchline in San Francisco, when I was a (mostly) open mic comedian. The first time I saw him perform, I was so blown away at the realness of his set, that I could not have a coherent conversation with the guy. The deadpan expression he had his face indicated that I was sounding like a fanboy, as I found it hard to express how important it was to hear him say the very things I’d only begun recently to think.
My homie Greg Edwards got me on the guest list a couple of years later, when he opened up for Patrice, and I was shocked when he remembered me and started a conversation (maybe it helped that I had a cute woman with me–a platonic friend but he didn’t know that).
He fucked the whole room up, and I knew he was killing it because my girl was crying she was laughing so hard. All those dark and sinister thoughts you’ve ever considered were brought to light by Patrice’s stand-up. He was the truth because he spoke the truth. There was this clever and twisted insight to his jokes–which really just seemed like commentary. Whether you like him or not, the fact was that if you watched the man work, you were never the same afterwards. The man understood human nature like no other comic I’d encountered.
About a year and a half ago, I was looking up some of his shit on Youtube and I randomly ran into some of his podcast archives online. There are only 15 episodes (at most) of this show he ran with Dante Nero called, “The Black Phillip Show.”
It was a relationship advice show that went way beyond anything you could imagine. Feminists would probably regard the show as some misogynistic “Dear Abby” shit, but it was more like some Dr. Phil (hence the name of the show).
Every show, there would be at least one female guest on, and Patrice would just eviscerate these women with his passionate logic.
It’s worth checking out for sure
He’ll really fuck you up with his logic. For example, Patrice has this special ratings scale for women that I attempted my senior year in high school. Now I thought back then (1997) that I was doing some revolutionary shit by creating a chart that graded on a 10 point spectrum. the categories were (don’t laugh) LEGS (3 points) , T & A (4 points), and face(3 points).
Stupid system right? It definitely wasn’t clever by any means, and certainly not worth the crap I took when girls at my school found out they were on a list (kinda like when I made a top 25 in junior high).
Well Mr. O’Neal’s system is slightly more sophisticated than that without the mini categories.
His scale is 1-30. 1-10 is for ugly chicks with 1 being the ugliest ugly chick, and 10 being the hottest an ugly chick can be.
An 11-20 rating was reserved for average to averagely good looking women, or as he calls them “alright looking bitches.” An alright looking alright bitch” is 11, a “fine ass alright bitch” would get a 20.
21-30 is the highest raking group reserved for “fine ass bitches.” An ugly ass fine bitch gets relegated to a score of 21, while a 30 is given to what men usually call dime pieces.
The whole point of his scale it to lend perspective on what we observe as a woman’s beauty. A 1-10 scale is highly restrictive. With only 10 points to give a grade, a lot of women get lumped into a really high or really low grade because of the need to jam them into a rating.
There are not as many perfect looking women (by conventional standards) out there as people would like to believe. The same can be said of the least aesthetically pleasing women out there in the world. Most women fall in between and that area of gray is a lot larger than a 1-10 scale can provide.
Hearing Patrice explain this during one of his stand-up shows, revealed the errors in my thinking about the opposite sex. It made me think of every girl I’d been physical with, and made me adjust how I thought about (handled) them. Say what you will about the guy, he will make you think.
He was honest, he was brave, and he was really fucking funny. The comedy world needs more comics like Patrice O’Neal; people who are capable of making an audience laugh and think. A lot of comics get on the mic and simply jerk off, wasting everyone’s time in the process because they lack a point of view.
But not Patrice; he didn’t have a whole of time in the mainstream spotlight, but he made use of every minute. I still go back from time to time and pull up his podcasts on Youtube–just to have something different to listen to when I fall asleep. The guy just had a firm handle on what it meant to be human, and he wasn’t afraid to talk about it. He was that dude.
Nuclear Polio Vaccination 
Leave a Reply